David Axelrod: Can the 'Axe' cut it as Barack Obama bids for US election victory?

The mastermind of Barack Obama's brilliant nomination campaign is a close
friend of the candidate, but little known beyond the Obama camp. Tim Shipman
reveals a man with something to prove.

On the trail: Barack Obama and David Axelrod have developed a close personal bond reminiscent of that between Tony Blair and Alistair CampbellPhoto: AP

By Tim Shipman

7:07PM BST 23 Aug 2008

David Axelrod can clearly remember where he was the first time he saw the man who inspired him to believe that politics can change the world. The strategist behind Barack Obama's White House campaign was perched on a post box in New York City as he watched a Democrat with a silver tongue fire up a generation of young voters.

The twist is that David Axelrod was then just five years old and the candidate in question was John F. Kennedy. But it is not fanciful to suggest that what he saw that day has shaped his life ever since.

By the age of nine, Axelrod was handing out leaflets for the New York Senate campaign of Bobby Kennedy, the man to whom Obama is most often compared by dewy-eyed American liberals.

There is an episode of the West Wing, the US drama, where Leo McGarry, the grizzled chief of staff, tells his deputy Josh Lyman that every political strategist has just one truly special candidate in their career. His was Jed Bartlett, the fictional president.

And so it was that Axelrod, a man who has worked on five losing presidential campaigns, found his Barlett in 1992, when he was introduced to a young African American activist who had impressed Chicago's "latte liberals" on a black voter registration drive.

Axelrod and Obama immediately hit it off and have developed a close personal bond reminiscent of that between Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell, based on progressive causes, late night games of basketball and a mutual love of the Chicago White Sox baseball team.

Obama consulted Axelrod before he made the anti-war speech in 2002 that first made his name, and again when he was writing his autobiography, The Audacity of Hope. Axelrod made adverts for Obama's successful senate run in 2004.

Now, he is the architect of the Obama campaign for the presidency – constantly honing the message, studying polling figures and working out his candidate's next move.

"I thought that if I could help Barack Obama get to Washington," said Axelrod, then I would have accomplished something great in my life."

With his lugubrious moustache and doleful eyes, Axelrod's demeanour is not that of a man on the cusp of making history if Obama wins this November. But his ear for language and his calm in the campaign hothouse have made him Obama's closest aide, the "keeper of the message" who first decided "Change" would echo through this campaign.

Axelrod claims no credit for the rhetorical flourishes. "One thing I came to realise early in the process of working with Barack was, he was always going to be the best writer in the room," he says.

But he was smart enough to build a campaign organisation that would underpin the soaring speeches. He brought in business partner David Plouffe to run the nuts and bolts of the ground war, a move that ensured Obama's inner circle pulled together during the primary elections while Hillary Clinton's aides formed a circular firing squad.

Axelrod borrowed from and improved the internet campaigning of his friend Joe Trippi, who masterminded Howard Dean's "netroots" campaign for the 2004 Democratic nomination, combining it with the kind of community activism on which Obama cut his political teeth.

Democratic strategist Steve McMahon said: "David Axelrod and David Plouffe have run maybe the best campaign in my lifetime. Beating the Clintons wasn't easy and they did it."

When he joins Obama at his major events, he is also one of the most approachable people in politics on either side of the Atlantic, just as happy to shoot the breeze with foreign reporters and the Armpitville Gazette as the dandies of network television news.

This approach was hugely beneficial to Obama during the primaries, a contrast with the hate-hate relationship between the Clinton media machine and the press corps.

Part of this is undoubtedly because Axelrod was once a journalist. Born in 1955 in New York to Jewish parents, (his father was a psychologist, his mother a crusading journalist), he joined the Chicago Tribune from university and quickly rose to become the paper's city hall bureau chief and then its youngest political columnist.

But in 1984, after eight years as a member of the fourth estate, the poacher turned gamekeeper. He signed on to work for Senator Paul Simon and within weeks was co-campaign chairman. He never looked back.

Axelrod, friends say, is a man who seeks out other's opinions and obsesses about whether he has made the right decisions, a trait shared by Obama. While Axelrod spends most of his time at headquarters in Chicago, the candidate and his guru speak dozens of times a day. However, if they win he would much more likely stay in Chicago than move to Washington to play the éminence grise for President Obama.

But the question now for the Democrats is whether this nice-guy double act has what it takes to win the White House at all.

Polls show Obama with a very slender lead, not the landslide many had expected, and one survey last week put him five points behind his Republican rival John McCain. The sharks are circling ahead of this week's convention as supporters of Hillary Clinton and many swing state voters remain stubbornly immune to his charms.

There are those who think that both Obama and Axelrod have been too complacent, too eager to believe their write-ups, just not ruthless enough.

There was evidence that last week that Axelrod was listening to the criticism, sharpening Obama's attacks on John McCain, rushing out adverts on the Republican's embarrassing inability to recall how many homes he owns (answer: at least seven).

In Axelrod's case there is plenty of evidence that he can cope with adversity and fight dirty of he needs to. Life has not always dealt him an easy hand. His parents divorced, his father committed suicide when he was 19 and one of his daughters has developmental difficulties caused by severe epilepsy.

And it surprises some to learn that the nice man with the moustache is also nicknamed "Axe". One client of two decades' standing is Chicago mayor Richard Daley, whose surname is a byword for machine politics.

Republican strategist Ed Rollins put Axelrod top of a list of "Guys I Never Want to See Lobbing Grenades at Me Again". Axelrod confesses that he like "everyone in this business, has a hand on that bloody dagger". Another vignette: on the basketball court, team-mates say that if you pass him the ball you are lucky to see it again.

Many in Chicago still remember Obama's 2004 senate primary race, where Axelrod's man trailed millionaire Blair Hull, until the Chicago papers reported that Hull's ex-wife had filed a protection order during their divorce.

Obama's team certainly pushed the story. Axelrod has always denied that it originated with him. Not everyone who was there believes him.

Others watched in awe the way Axelrod used his personal ties with Hillary Clinton to get her to campaign for an epilepsy cure, a cause close to his heart, then severed those links when Obama decided to run for president as well.

Swing a cat at the convention this week and you will hit a rich Democratic strategist who has never won a presidential election. Axelrod would like to leave their ranks. But to do so he needs his Jed Bartlett to be just as ruthless as he is.

Asked why he could not do for John Edwards, his candidate four years ago, what he has done for Obama, he replied: "At some point the candidate has to close the deal and – I can't tell you why – that never happened with John."

There will be moments in the 2008 campaign, and this week is one such, when Barack Obama has to close the deal. Despite Axelrod's brilliance, his candidate hasn't done so yet.